Yesterday I arrived in Ghent. I left at eight in the morning with a large green suitcase, a vacuum-sealed package and a large black bike bag from St Pancras, only five minutes from my parent’s house. My father waved me off; but it was not a clamorous goodbye as some goodbyes I have had. I left quietly, perhaps a little sadly, like a single migrating bird.
I knew the journey already, so decided to forgo the repetition of views. Within the sealed-in world of the Eurostar and its continental comforts I slept, my head against the window. There was a brief stop at Lille but otherwise we charged onwards: sleekly, silkenly, in our carapace of shining aluminium.
Not much happened: a slightly eccentric English woman in her fifties thanked me emphatically for lifting her suitcase into the luggage compartment above her. A rotund man in his forties sat behind me and kept making nervous phone calls to a supplier in Brussels about missing ‘equipment’. In Brussels a man with a handlebar moustache offered to help me with my bike bag. Then I boarded my regional train bound for Ghent. The world that I glimpsed out of the window reminded me in many ways of England, but aslant: with diminutive ponies grazing in small, square paddocks and houses with long slanting roofs, scaled in solar panels.
Then I saw the lovely little red-bricked bell tower of St Pieter’s Station and I knew that I had arrived in Ghent. After a twenty minute trudge I hailed down an Albanian taxi driver with brown, flashing sunglasses on who conveyed me to my to home on the Donderwendse Steenweg. Down I plopped onto a street I had only seen once before, in a Turkish district of Ghent beyond the railway, which, for those of you who have been there, reminds me strongly of Dalston.
My flat is no palace, but it has a run-down charm that appeals to me. One thing that marks it out is that it is right above a Turkish kebab shop, so I can have as many falafel wraps as I want. Another thing that I like about this flat is that there is a lot of light and it is very spacious. Sharing the flat with only one other flatmate, we have: 2 bathrooms and a separate WC, a large kitchen (which in its décor and arrangement is very reminiscent of the 1960s), a two-room living room, a balcony, washing room and three bedrooms.
My bedroom when I arrived, and indeed now, four days on, is very sparsely furnished. It is the continental habit, when leaving a place of residence to take everything with you: curtains, bedstead, even, as someone later assured me, curtain rails. The question of how to furnish my room to a habitable standard for only a few months, without spending unnecessary money is a real condundrum. But I’m sure I will manage. Stan has offered the use of his car; and as I have an eye for old tattered things, I’m sure that I will be storming the rag and bone warehouses of Ghent very shortly.
So when I arrived I made my bed on the floor, unpacked my single suitcase of possessions, and basked momentarily, in the joy of having almost no acquisitions at all.
833 words a day 